News

Moore School Hosts Marketing Research Symposium

April 20, 2011

Following its successful inaugural in 2010, this year’s Darla Moore School of Business Marketing Research Symposium was held on April 15, 2011. Consistent with the Marketing Department’s strong research reputation, four leading researchers agreed to make contributions to this year’s symposium: Rebecca Hamilton (University of Maryland), Stacy Wood (North Carolina State University), Christophe Van den Bulte (University of Pennsylvania) and Sundar Bharadwaj (Emory University). The presentations spanned a wide range of topics related to consumer behavior and marketing strategy. The symposium was well attended by faculty members and doctoral students from the marketing department, as well as interested colleagues from the economics and management science departments.

After Associate Dean Greg Niehaus’ welcome remarks, the first speaker, Rebecca Hamilton, presented her findings on how predicting experienced regret is difficult for consumers because the construct of regret is both multidimensional and dynamic. Her presentation was followed by Stacy Wood’s talk on two recent studies—one on death and one on deception that emphasize how consumer behavior research can address questions of widespread interest and societal benefit.

After lunch, Christophe Van den Bulte gave a talk on innovation adoption and presented a partial observability model with a two-stage conception of innovation adoption—awareness or consideration followed by evaluation and adoption. Lastly, Sundar Bharadwaj presented his research on the impact of brand quality on three components of shareholder wealth, stock returns, systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk.

The diverse topics presented generated enthusiastic and stimulating scholarly discussions among symposium participants. The symposium ended with a cocktail hour and dinner at the Top of Carolina, Capstone House’s revolving restaurant.